Having restrained them all, he should sit
steadfast, intent on Me; his wisdom is steady whose sense are under control.

EXPLANATION : Since the sense organs are thus the
saboteurs in the kingdom of the spirit who bring the disastrous downfall of the
empire of the soul, Arjuna is warned here that as a seeker of Self-perfection
he should constantly struggle to control all his sense organs and their mad
lustful wanderings in their respective fields. Modern psychology certainly
would look down with a protruding squint eye upon this Geeta theory because,
according to Freud and others, sensuousness is instinctive in man and to curb
it is to suppress the sensuousness in man.

According to the West, to control is to suppress,
and on science of mental life can accept that suppression is psychologically
healthy. But the Vedic theory is not pointing to any mental suppression at all
they are only advising an inward blossoming, an inner growth and development,
by which its earlier fields of enjoyments through the senses drop out of the
fuller grown man who has come to the perception of a newer field of ampler joys
and more satisfying bliss.

The idea is very well brought out here in the
stanza when Lord Krishna, as though in the very same breath, repeats both the
negative and the positive aspects of the technique of self-development. He
advises not only a withdrawal from the unhealthy gutters of sensuousness but
also gives the healthy method of doing so by explaining to us the positive
technique in Self-perfection. Through a constant attempt at focusing our
attention "One me, the Supreme," he advises the disciples to sit
steady.

In this simple-looking statement of half-a-stanza,
Geeta explains the entire technique of Self-development. Immortal impulses and
unethical instincts that bring own a man to the level of a mere brute are the
result of endless lives spent among sensuous objects during the infinite number
of different manifestations through which the embodied soul--the ego--in each
one of us had previously passed. The thick coating of mental impressions that
we gathered thus in our pilgrimage is humanly impossible for one solitary
individual to erase or transcend in one's own little lifetime. Naturally, this
is the despair of all the promoters of ethics, the teachers of morality and the
masters of spirituality. The rishis of old, in vivid experience, have
discovered for themselves a technique by which all these mental tendencies can
be eradicated. To expose the mind to the quite atmosphere of meditation upon
the All-perfect Being is to heal the mind of its ulcers. By this process, he
who has come to gain a complete mastery over his sense organs is called the one
who is `steadfast in wisdom'.

The concealed suggestion in the stanza is quite
obvious: nobody who with excessive force controls his indriyas by the sheer
strength of his will and sense of abstinence has any chance of flowering
himself into full-blown spiritual beauty. When the sense organs have, of their
own accord, come back tamely to lie surrendered at the feet of one who has come
to rediscover the Infinite Perfection in himself, he is called `a Man of
Perfection'. Neither has he ruined his instruments of cognition nor has he
closed down the arches of knowledge in him. A Perfect One is he whose sway over
the animal in him is so complete that the inner Satan has become, for the sage
in him, a tame cannibal to run errands and serve him faithfully.